In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been
turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,"he told me," just remember that all the
people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a
reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.
In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened
up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran
bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when
it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly
accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown
men. Most of the confidences were unsought-frequently I have feigned sleep,
preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an
intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon-for the intimate revelations of
young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic
and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.
I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly
suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled
out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a
limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a
certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East
last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral
attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into
the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt
from my reaction-Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected
scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was
something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,
as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten
thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby
impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"-it
was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found
in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No-Gatsby
turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated
in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive
sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for
three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition
that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my
line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to
the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries
on today.
I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him-with special reference
to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from
New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I
participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed
the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm
center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the
universe-so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew
was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man.
All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me
and finally said, "Why-ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance
me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring
of twenty-two.